I was also raised in an evangelical household and taught the same association. This letter reminded me of that in specific and of associations in general.
Are you in fanfic fandom? Over there we're dealing with the anti-shippers, aka antis, who profess to believe that certain topics shouldn't be written about at all, even if properly tagged. I've noticed that in discussions many of them have trained themselves to associate "don't censor" with "I am a pedophile IRL who loves reading underage fic" At least those are the accusations they repeat over, and over, and over, and over, whenever the topic of censoring fic comes up. They seem to view it as a necessary logical conclusion: if someone opposes censorship they must be defending pedophilia. It's interesting how thoroughly they've trained themselves to make that completely illogical conclusion.
But then (to circle back) it was interesting to see how the evangelical adults in my life talked about queer people solely as having "disgusting" sex, having convinced themselves of that (weird as fuck) association. I had to do research (for amusement, picture little me reading archived newspapers) to learn that gay men were in the news because of the AIDS crisis, etc. The evangelicals around me never talked about queer people as *people*, only as sodomites.
no subject
Are you in fanfic fandom? Over there we're dealing with the anti-shippers, aka antis, who profess to believe that certain topics shouldn't be written about at all, even if properly tagged. I've noticed that in discussions many of them have trained themselves to associate "don't censor" with "I am a pedophile IRL who loves reading underage fic" At least those are the accusations they repeat over, and over, and over, and over, whenever the topic of censoring fic comes up. They seem to view it as a necessary logical conclusion: if someone opposes censorship they must be defending pedophilia. It's interesting how thoroughly they've trained themselves to make that completely illogical conclusion.
But then (to circle back) it was interesting to see how the evangelical adults in my life talked about queer people solely as having "disgusting" sex, having convinced themselves of that (weird as fuck) association. I had to do research (for amusement, picture little me reading archived newspapers) to learn that gay men were in the news because of the AIDS crisis, etc. The evangelicals around me never talked about queer people as *people*, only as sodomites.